Joseph Native Aboriginal Information

Textile manufacturing

Processing of Cotton

Cotton Manufacturing Processes (after Murray 1911)

Bale Breaker

Blowing Room

Willowing

Breaker Scutcher

Batting

Finishing Scutcher

Lapping

Carding

Carding Room

Silver Lap

Combing

Drawing

Slubbing

Intermediate

Roving

Fine Roving

Mule Spinning

Ring Spinning

Spinning

Reeling

Doubling

Winding

Bundling

Bleaching

Winding

Warping

Cabling

Sizing/Slashing/Dressing

Gassing

Weaving

Spooling

Cloth

Yarn (Cheese)- – Bundle

Sewing Thread

Cotton is the world’s most important natural fibre. In the year 2007, the global yield was 25 million tons from 35 million hectares cultivated in more than 50 countries.

There are five stages

Cultivating and Harvesting

Preparatory Processes

Spinning

Weaving

Finishing

Cultivating and harvesting

Cotton is grown anywhere with long, hot dry summers with plenty of sunshine and low humidity. Indian cotton, gossypium arboreum, is finer but the staple is only suitable for hand processing. American cotton, gossypium hirsutum, produces the longer staple needed for machine production. Planting is from September to mid November and the crop is harvested between March and May. The cotton bolls are harvested by stripper harvesters and spindle pickers, that remove the entire boll from the plant. The cotton boll is the seed pod of the cotton plant, attached to each of the thousands of seeds are fibres about 2.5 cm long.

Ginning

The seed cotton goes in to a Cotton gin. The cotton gin separates seeds and removes the “trash” (dirt, stems and leaves) from the fibre. In a saw gin, circular saws grab the fibre and pull it through a grating that is too narrow for the seeds to pass. A roller gin is used with longer staple cotton. Here a leather roller captures the cotton. A knife blade, set close to the roller, detaches the seeds by drawing them through teeth in circular saws and revolving brushes which clean them away.

The ginned cotton fibre, known as lint, is then compressed into bales which are about 1.5 m tall and weigh almost 220 kg. Only 33% of the crop is usable lint. Commercial cotton is priced by quality, and that broadly relates to the average length of the staple, and the variety of the plant. Longer staple cotton (2 in to 1 in) is called Egyptian, medium staple (1 in to in) is called American upland and short staple (less than in) is called Indian.

The cotton seed is pressed into a cooking oil. The husks and meal are processed into animal feed, and the stems into paper.

Issues

Cotton is farmed intensively and uses large amounts of fertiliser and 25% of the worlds insecticide. Native Indian variety were rainwater fed, but modern hybrids used for the mills need irrigation, which spreads pests. The 5% of cotton-bearing land in India uses 55% of all pesticides used in India. Before mechanisation, cotton was harvested manually and this unpleasant task was done by the lower castes, and in the United States by slaves of African origin.

Preparatory Processes- Preparation of yarn

Ginning, bale-making and transportation is done in the country of origin.

Opening and cleaning

Platt Bros. Picker

Cotton mills get the cotton shipped to them in large, 500 pound bales. When the cotton comes out of a bale, it is all packed together and still contains vegetable matter. The bale is broken open using a machine with large spikes. It is called an Opener.In order to fluff up the cotton and remove the vegetable matter, the cotton is sent through a picker, or similar machines. A picker looks similar to the carding machine and the cotton gin, but is slightly different. The cotton is fed into the machine and gets beaten with a beater bar, to loosen it up. It is fed through various rollers, which serve to remove the vegetable matter. The cotton, aided by fans, then collects on a screen and gets fed through more rollers till it emerges as a continuous soft fleecy sheet, known as a lap.

Blending,

Mixing & Scutching

Carding

Main article: Carding

Carding machine

Carding: the fibres are separated and then assembled into a loose strand (sliver or tow) at the conclusion of this stage.

The cotton comes off of the picking machine in laps, and is then taken to carding machines. The carders line up the fibres nicely to make them easier to spin. The carding machine consists mainly of one big roller with smaller ones surrounding it. All of the rollers are covered in small teeth, and as the cotton progresses further on the teeth get finer (i.e. closer together). The cotton leaves the carding machine in the form of a sliver; a large rope of fibres.

Note: In a wider sense Carding can refer to these four processes: Willowing- loosening the fibres; Lapping- removing the dust to create a flat sheet or lap of cotton; Carding- combing the tangled lap into a thick rope of 1/2 in in diameter, a sliver; and Drawing- where a drawing frame combines 4 slivers into one- repeated for increased quality.

Combing is optional,but is used to remove the shorter fibres, creating a stronger yarn.

A Combing machine

Drawing the fibres are straightened

Several slivers are combined. Each sliver will have thin and thick spots, and by combining several slivers together a more consistent size can be reached. Since combining several slivers produces a very thick rope of cotton fibres, directly after being combined the slivers are separated into rovings. These rovings are then what are used in the spinning process. Generally speaking, for machine processing a roving is about the width of a pencil.Next, several slivers are combined. Each sliver will have thin and thick spots, and by combining several slivers together a more consistent size can be reached. Since combining several slivers produces a very thick rope of cotton fibres, directly after being combined the slivers are separated into rovings. These rovings (or slubbings) are then what are used in the spinning process.

Generally speaking, for machine processing, a roving is about the width of a pencil.

Drawing frame: Draws the strand out

Slubbing Frame: adds twist, and winds on to bobbins

Intermediate Frames: are used to repeat the slubbing process to produce a finer yarn.

Roving frames: reduces to a finer thread, gives more twist, makes more regular and even in thickness, and winds on to a smaller tube.

Spinning- Yarn manufacture

Main article: Cotton-spinning machinery

Spinning

The spinning machines take the roving, thins it and twists it, creating yarn which it winds onto a bobbin.

In mule spinning the roving is pulled off a bobbin and fed through some rollers, which are feeding at several different speeds.This thins the roving at a consistent rate. If the roving was not a consistent size, then this step could cause a break in the yarn, or could jam the machine. The yarn is twisted through the spinning of the bobbin as the carriage moves out, and is rolled onto a cop as the carriage returns. Mule spinning produces a finer thread than the less skilled ring spinning.

The mule was an intermittent process, as the frame advanced and returned a distance of 5ft.It was the descendant of 1779 Crompton device. It produces a softer less twisted thread that was favoured for fines and for weft. It requires considerable skill, so was womens work.

The ring was a descendant of the Arkwright water Frame 1769. It was a continuous process, the yard was coarser, had a greater twist and was stronger so was suited to be warp. Requiring less skill it was mens work. Ring spinning is slow due to the distance the thread must pass around the ring, other methods have been introduced. These are collectively known as Break or Open-end spinning.

Sewing thread, was made of several threads twisted together, or doubled.

Checking

This is the process where each of the bobbins is rewound to give a tighter bobbin.

Folding and twisting

Plying is done by pulling yarn from two or more bobbins and twisting it together, in the opposite direction that that in which it was spun. Depending on the weight desired, the cotton may or may not be plied, and the number of strands twisted together varies.

Gassing

Main articles: Singe#Textiles and Gassing

Gassing is the process of passing yarn, as distinct from fabric very rapidly through a series of Bunsen gas flames in a gassing frame, in order to burn off the projecting fibres and make the thread round and smooth and also brighter. Only the better qualities of yarn are gassed, such as that used for voiles, poplins, venetians, gabardines, many Egyptian qualities, etc. There is a loss of weight in gassing, which varies’ about 5 to 8 per cent., so that if a 2/60′s yarn is required 2/56′s would be used. The gassed yarn is darker in shade afterwards, but should not be scorched.

Mule spinning

Ring spinning

Measurements

Main article: Units of textile measurement

Cotton Counts: The number of pieces of thread, 840 yards long needed to make up 1 lb weight. 10 count cotton means that 10×840 yd weighs 1 lb. This is coarser than 40 count cotton where 40×840 yards are needed. In the United Kingdom, Counts to 40s are coarse (Oldham Counts), 40 to 80s are medium counts and above 80 is a fine count. In the United States ones to 20s are coarse counts.

Hank: A length of 7 leas or 840 yards

Thread: A length of 54 in (the circumference of a warp beam)

Bundle: Usually 10 lb

Lea: A length of 80 threads or 120 yards

Denier: this is an alternative method. It is defined as a number that is equivalent to the weight in grams of 9000m of a single yarn. 15 denier is finer than 30 denier.

Tex: is the weight in grams of 1 km of yarn.

The worsted hank is only 560 yd

Weaving-fabric manufacture

The weaving process uses a loom. The lengthway threads are known as the warp, and the cross way threads are known as the weft. The warp which must be strong needs to be presented to loom on a warp beam. The weft, passes across the loom in a shuttle, that carries the yarn on a pirn. These pirns are automatically changed by the loom. Thus, the yarn needs to be wrapped onto a beam, and onto pirns before weaving can commence.

Winding

After being spun and plied, the cotton thread is taken to a warping room where the winding machine takes the required length of yarn and winds it onto warpers bobbins

Warping or beaming

A Warper

Racks of bobbins are set up to hold the thread while it is rolled onto the warp bar of a loom. Because the thread is fine, often three of these would be combined to get the desired thread count.[citation needed].

Sizing

Slasher sizing machine needed for strengthening the warp by adding starch.

Drawing in, Looming

The process of drawing each end of the warp separately through the dents of the reed and the eyes of the healds, in the order indicated by the draft.

Pirning (Processing the weft)

Pirn winding frame was used to transfer the weft from cheeses of yarn onto the pirns that would fit into the shuttle

Weaving

Main article: Power loom

At this point, the thread is woven. Depending on the era, one person could manage anywhere from 3 to 100 machines. In the mid nineteenth century, four was the standard number. A skilled weaver in 1925 would run 6 Lancashire Looms. As time progressed new mechanisms were added that stopped the loom any time something went wrong. The mechanisms checked for such things as a broken warp thread, broken weft thread, the shuttle going straight across, and if the shuttle was empty. Forty of these Northrop Looms or automatic looms could be operated by one skilled worker.

A Draper loom in textile museum,Lowell, Massachusetts

The three primary movements of a loom are shedding, picking, and beating-up.

Shedding: The operation of dividing the warp into two lines, so that the shuttle can pass between these lines. There are two general kinds of sheds-”open” and “closed.” Open Shed-The warp threads are moved when the pattern requires it-from one line to the other. Closed Shed-The warp threads are all placed level in one line after each pick.

Picking:The operation of projecting the shuttle from side to side of the loom through the division in the warp threads. This is done by the overpick or underpick motions. The overpick is suitable for quick-running looms, whereas the underpick is best for heavy or slow looms.

Beating-up: The third primary movement of the loom when making cloth, and is the action of the reed as it drives each pick of weft to the fell of the cloth.

The Lancashire Loom was the first semi-automatic loom. Jacquard looms and Dobby looms are looms that have sophisticated methods of shedding. They may be separate looms, or mechanisms added to a plain loom. A Northrop Loom was fully automatic and was mass produced between 1909 and the mid 1960s. Modern looms run faster and do not use a shuttle: there are air jet looms, water jet looms and rapier looms.

Measurements

Ends and Picks: Picks refer to the weft, ends refer to the warp. The coarseness of the cloth can be expressed as the number of picks and ends per quarter inch square, or per inch square. Ends is always written first. For example: Heavy domestics are made from coarse yarns, such as 10′s to 14′s warp and weft, and about 48 ends and 52 picks.

Associated job titles

Piecer

Scavenger

Weaver

Tackler

Draw boy

Pirner

Issues

When a hand loom was located in the home, children helped with the weaving process from an early age. Piecing needs dexterity, and a child can be as productive as an adult. When weaving moves from the home to the mill, children were often allowed to help their older sisters, and laws have to be made to prevent child labour becoming established,

Knitting- Fabric manufacture

A circular knitting machine.

Close-up on the needles.

Knitting by machine is done in two different ways; warp and weft. Weft knitting (as seen in the pictures) is similar in method to hand knitting with stitches all connected to each other horizontally. Various weft machines can be configured to produce textiles from a single spool of yarn or multiple spools depending on the size of the machine cylinder (where the needles are bedded). In a warp knit there are many pieces of yarn and there are vertical chains, zigzagged together by crossing the yarn.

Warp knits do not stretch as much as a weft knit, and it is run-resistant. A weft knit is not run-resistant, but stretches more, this is especially true if spools of Lycra are processed from separate spool containers and interwoven through the cylinder with cotton yarn giving the finished product more flexibility making it less prone to having a ‘baggy’ appearance. The average t-shirt is a weft knit.

Finishing- Processing of Textiles

The grey cloth,woven cotton fabric in its loom-state, not only contains impurities, including warp size, but requires further treatment in order to develop its full textile potential. Furthermore, it may receive considerable added value by applying one or more finishing processes.

Desizing

Depending on the size that has been used, the cloth may be steeped in a dilute acid and then rinsed, or enzymes may be used to break down the size.

Scouring

Scouring, is a chemical washing process carried out on cotton fabric to remove natural wax and non-fibrous impurities (eg the remains of seed fragments) from the fibres and any added soiling or dirt. Scouring is usually carried in iron vessels called kiers. The fabric is boiled in an alkali, which forms a soap with free fatty acids. (saponification). A kier is usually enclosed, so the solution of sodium hydroxide can be boiled under pressure, excluding oxygen which would degrade the cellulose in the fibre. If the appropriate reagents are used, scouring will also remove size from the fabric although desizing often precedes scouring and is considered to be a separate process known as fabric preparation. Preparation and scouring are prerequisites to most of the other finishing processes. At this stage even the most naturally white cotton fibres are yellowish, and bleaching, the next process, is required.

Bleaching

Main article: Textile bleaching

Bleaching improves whiteness by removing natural coloration and remaining trace impurities from the cotton; the degree of bleaching necessary is determined by the required whiteness and absorbency. Cotton being a vegetable fibre will be bleached using an oxidizing agent, such as dilute sodium hydrochlorite or dilute hydrogen peroxide. If the fabric is to be dyed a deep shade, then lower levels of bleaching are acceptable, for example. However, for white bed sheetings and medical applications, the highest levels of whiteness and absorbency are essential.

Mercerising

Main article: Mercerized cotton

A further possibility is mercerizing during which the fabric is treated with caustic soda solution to cause swelling of the fibres. This results in improved lustre, strength and dye affinity. Cotton is mercerized under tension, and all alkali must be washed out before the tension is released or shrinkage will take place. Mercerizing can take place directly on grey cloth, or after bleaching.

Many other chemical treatments may be applied to cotton fabrics to produce low flammability, crease resist and other special effects but four important non-chemical finishing treatments are:

Singeing

Main article: Singe#Textiles

Singeing is designed to burn off the surface fibres from the fabric to produce smoothness. The fabric passes over brushes to raise the fibres, then passes over a plate heated by gas flames.

Raising

Another finishing process is raising. During raising, the fabric surface is treated with sharp teeth to lift the surface fibres, thereby imparting hairiness, softness and warmth, as in flannelette.

Calendering

Main article: Calender

Calendering is the third important mechanical process, in which the fabric is passed between heated rollers to generate smooth, polished or embossed effects depending on roller surface properties and relative speeds.

Shrinking (Sanforizing)

Main article: Sanforization

Finally, mechanical shrinking (sometimes referred to as sanforizing), whereby the fabric is forced to shrink width and/or lengthwise, creates a fabric in which any residual tendency to shrink after subsequent laundering is minimal.

Dyeing

Main article: Dyeing

Finally, cotton is an absorbent fibre which responds readily to colouration processes. Dyeing, for instance, is commonly carried out with an anionic direct dye by completely immersing the fabric (or yarn) in an aqueous dyebath according to a prescribed procedure. For improved fastness to washing, rubbing and light, other dyes such as vats and reactives are commonly used. These require more complex chemistry during processing and are thus more expensive to apply.

Printing

Main article: Textile printing

Printing, on the other hand, is the application of colour in the form of a paste or ink to the surface of a fabric, in a predetermined pattern. It may be considered as localised dyeing. Printing designs on to already dyed fabric is also possible.

Economic, environmental and political consequences of cotton manufacture

The growth of cotton is divided into two segments i.e. organic and genetically modified. . Cotton crop provides livelihood to millions of people but its production is becoming expensive because of high water consumption, use of expensive pesticides, insecticides and fertiliser. GM products aim to increase disease resistance and reduce the water required. The organic sector was worth $583 million. GM cotton, in 2007, occupied 43% of cotton growing areas..

The consumption of energy in form of water and electricity is relatively high, especially in processes like washing, de-sizing, bleaching, rinsing, dyeing, printing, coating and finishing. Processing is time consuming. The major portion of water in textile industry is used for wet processing of textile (70 per cent). Approximately 25 per cent of energy in the total textile production like fibre production, spinning, twisting, weaving, knitting, clothing manufacturing etc. is used in dyeing. About 34 per cent of energy is consumed in spinning, 23 per cent in weaving, 38 per cent in chemical wet processing and five per cent in miscellaneous processes. Power dominates consumption pattern in spinning and weaving, while thermal energy is the major factor for chemical wet processing.

Processing of other vegetable fibres- other processes

Flax

Main article: Flax

Flax is a bast fibre, which means it comes in bundles under the bark of the Linum usitatissimum plant. The plant flowers and is harvested.

Retting

Breaking

Scutching

Hackling or combing

It is now treated like cotton.

Jute

Main article: Jute

Jute is a bast fibre, which comes from the inner bark of the plants of the Corchorus genus. It is retted like flax, sundried and baled. When spinning a small amount of oil must be added to the fibre. It can be bleached and dyed. It was used for sacks and bags but is now used for the backing for carpets.

Hemp

Main article: Hemp

Hemp is a bast fibre from the inner bark of Cannabis sativa. It is difficult to bleach, it is used for making cord and rope.

Retting

Separating

Pounding

Other bast fibres

These bast fibres can also be used: kenaf, urena, ramie, nettle.

Other leaf fibres

Sisal is the main leaf fibre used; others are: abac and henequen.

Processing of Protein fibres

Wool comes from domesticated sheep. It forms two products, woolens and worsteds. The sheep has two sorts of wool and it in the inner coat that is used. This can be mixed with wool that has been recovered from rags. Shoddy is the term for recovered wool that is not matted, while mungo comes from felted wool. Extract is recovered chemically from mixed cotton/wool fabrics.

The fleece is cut in one piece from the sheep.This is then skirted to remove the soiled wool, and baled. It is graded into long wool where the fibres can be up to 15 in, but anything over 2.5 inches is suitable for combing into worsteds. Fibres less than that form short wool and are described as clothing or carding wool.

At the mill the wool is scoured in a detergent to remove grease (the yolk) and impurities. This is done mechanically in the opening machine. Vegetable matter can be removed chemically using sulfuric acid (carbonising). Washing uses a solution of soap and sodium carbonate. The wool is oiled before carding or combing.

Woollens: Use noils from the worsted combs, mungo and shoddy and new short wool

Worsteds

Combing: Oiled slivers are wound into laps, and placed in the circular comber. The worsted yarn gathers together to form a top. The shorter fibres or noils remain behind and are removed with a knife.

Angora

Silk

The processes in silk production are similar to those of cotton but take account that reeeled silk is a continuous fibre. The terms used are different.

Opening bales. Assorting skeins:where silk is sorted by colour, size and quality, scouring: where the silk is washed in water of 40 degrees for 12 hours to remove the natural gum, drying:either by steam heating or centrifuge, softening: by rubbing to remove any remaining hard spots.

Silk throwing (winding). The skeins are placed on a reel in a frame with many others. The silk is wound onto spools or bobbins.

Doubling and twisting. The silk is far too fine to be woven, so now it is doubled and twisted to make the warp, known as organzine and the weft, known as tram. In organzine each single is given a few twists per inch (tpi), and combine with several other singles counter twisted hard at 10 to 14 tpi. In tram the two singles are doubled with each other with a light twist, 3 to 6 tpi. Sewing thread is two tram threads, hard twisted and machine-twist is made of three hard twisted tram threads. Tram for the crepe process is twisted at up to 80 tpi to make it ‘kick up’.

Stretching. The thread is tested for consistent size. Any uneven thickness is stretched out. The resulting thread is reeled into containing 500 yd to 2500 yd. The skeins are about 50 in in loop length.

Dyeing: the skeins are scoured again, and discoloration removed with a sulphur process. This weakens the silk. The skeins are now tinted or dyed. They are dried and rewound onto bobbins, spools and skeins. Looming, and the weaving process on power looms is the same as with cotton.

Weaving. The organzine is now warped. This is a similar process to in cotton. Firstly, thirty threads or so are wound onto a warping reel, and then using the warping reels, the threads are beamed. A thick layer of paper is lain between each layer on the beam to stop entangling.

Processing of man made fibres

Discussion of types of man made fibres

Main article: Synthetic fibre

Synthetic fibres are the result of extensive development by scientists to improve upon the naturally occurring animal and plant fibres. In general, synthetic fibers are created by forcing, or extruding, fibre forming materials through holes (called spinnerets) into the air, thus forming a thread. Before synthetic fibres were developed, cellulose fibers were made from natural cellulose, which comes from plants.

The first artificial fibre, known as art silk from 1799 onwards, became known as viscose around 1894, and finally rayon in 1924. A similar product known as cellulose acetate was discovered in 1865. Rayon and acetate are both artificial fibres, but not truly synthetic, being made from wood. Although these artificial fibres were discovered in the mid-nineteenth century, successful modern manufacture began much later in the 1930s. Nylon, the first synthetic fibre, made its debut in the United States as a replacement for silk, and was used for parachutes and other military uses.[citation needed]

The techniques used to process these fibres in yarn are essentially the same as with natural fibres, modifications have to be made as these fibers are of great length, and have no texture such as the scales in cotton and wool that aid meshing.[citation needed]

Additional processes associated with man made fibres

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Invitation to the Dance

When Europeans undertook their campaigns of conquest and exploration in what seemed to them “new” worlds, they found the natives engaged in many strange and lurid activities. Cannibalism was reported, though seldom convincingly documented, along with human sacrifice, bodily mutilation, body and face painting, and flagrantly open sexual practices. Equally jarring to European sensibilities was the almost ubiquitous practice of ecstatic ritual, in which the natives would gather to dance, sing, or chant to a state of exhaustion and, beyond that, sometimes trance. Everywhere they went — among the hunter-gatherers of Australia, the horticulturists of Polynesia, the village peoples of India — white men and occasionally women witnessed these electrifying rites so frequently that there seemed to them to be, among “the present societies of savage men . . . an extraordinary uniformity, in spite of much local variation, in ritual and mythology.” The European idea of the “savage” came to focus on the image of painted and bizarrely costumed bodies, drumming and dancing with wild abandon by the light of a fire.

What did they actually see? A single ritual could look very different to different observers. When he arrived in Tahiti in the late 1700s, Captain Cook watched groups of girls performing “a very indecent dance which they call Timorodee, singing the most indecent songs and using most indecent actions . . . In doing this they keep time to a great nicety.” About sixty years later, Herman Melville found the same ritual, by then called “Lory-Lory” and perhaps modified in other ways, full of sensual charm.

Presently, raising a strange chant, they softly sway themselves, gradually quickening the movement, until at length, for a few passionate moments with throbbing bosoms, and glowing cheeks, they abandon themselves to all the spirit of the dance, apparently lost to everything around. But soon subsiding again into the same languid measure as before, the eyes swimming in their heads, join in one wild chorus, and sink into each other’s arms.

Like Captain Cook, Charles Darwin was repelled by the corroborree rite of western Australians, reporting that

the dancing consisted in their running either sideways or in Indian file into an open space, and stamping the ground with great force as they marched together. Their heavy footsteps were accompanied with a kind of grunt, by beating their clubs and spears together, and by various other gesticulations, such as extending their arms and wriggling their bodies. It was a most rude, barbarous scene, and, to our ideas, without any sort of meaning.

But to the anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, a similar Aboriginal rite was far more compelling, perhaps even enticing: “The smoke, the blazing torches, the showers of sparks falling in all directions and the masses of dancing, yelling men formed a genuinely wild and savage scene of which it is impossible to convey any adequate idea in words.” It was this description that fed into the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s notion of collective effervescence: the ritually induced passion or ecstasy that cements social bonds and, he proposed, forms the ultimate basis of religion.

Through the institution of slavery, European Americans had the opportunity to observe their own captive “natives” at close range, and they too reported varying and contradictory responses to the ecstatic rituals of the transplanted Africans. Many whites of the slave-owning class saw such practices as “noisy, crude, impious, and, simply, dissolute,” and took strong measures to suppress them. The nineteenth-century absentee owner of a Jamaican plantation found his slaves doing a myal dance, probably derived from an initiation rite of the Azande people of Africa, and described them as engaged in “a great variety of grotesque actions, and chanting all the while something between a song and a howl.” Similarly, an English visitor to Trinidad in 1845 reported disgustedly that

on Christmas Eve, it seemed as if, under the guise of religion, all Pandemonium had been let loose . . . Drunkenness bursting forth in yells and bacchanalian orgies, was universal amongst the blacks . . . Sleep was out of the question, in the midst of such a disgusting and fiendish saturnalia . . . The musicians were attended by a multitude of drunken people of both sexes, the women being of the lowest class; and all dancing, screaming and clapping their hands, like so many demons. All this was the effect of the “midnight mass,” ending, as all such masses do, in every species of depravity.

Other white observers, though, were sometimes surprised to find themselves drawn in by the peculiar power of such African-derived rituals and festivities. Traveling in the mid-nineteenth century, Frederick Law Olmsted observed a black Christian service in New Orleans and was swept up by the “shouts, and groans, terrific shrieks, and indescribable expressions of ecstasy — of pleasure or agony,” to the point where he found his own face “glowing” and feet stamping, as if he had been “infected unconsciously.” Clinton Furness, a traveler to South Carolina in the 1920s, reported a similar experience while watching an African American ring-shout, or danced form of religious worship.

Several men moved their feet alternately, in strange syncopation. A rhythm was born, almost without reference to the words of the preacher. It seemed to take place almost visibly, and grow. I was gripped with the feeling of a mass-intelligence, a self-conscious entity, gradually informing the crowd and taking possession of every mind there, including my own . . . I felt as if some conscious plan or purpose were carrying us along, call it mob-mind, communal composition, or what you will.

On the whole, though, white observers regarded the ecstatic rituals of darker-skinned peoples with horror and revulsion. Grotesque is one word that appears again and again in European accounts of such events; hideous is another. Henri Junod, a nineteenth-century Swiss missionary among the Ba-Ronga people of southern Mozambique, complained of the drums’ “frightful din” and “infernal racket.” Other Catholic missionaries, upon hearing the African drumbeat announcing a ritual event, felt it was their duty to disrupt “the hellish practice.” Well into the twentieth century, the sound of drumming was enough to spook the white traveler, suggestive as it was of a world beyond human ken. “I have never heard an eerier sound,” a young English visitor to South Africa reports in the 1910 novel Prester John. “Neither human nor animal it seemed, but the voice of that world between which is hid from man’s sight and hearing.” In the introduction to his 1926 book on tribal dancing, the writer W.D. Hambly pleaded with his readers for a little “sympathy” for his subject.

The student of primitive music and dancing will have to cultivate a habit of broad-minded consideration for the actions of backward races . . . Music and dancing performed wildly by firelight in a tropical forest have not seldom provoked the censure and disgust of European visitors, who have seen only what is grotesque or sensual.

Or, in many cases, may have elected not to see at all: When the intrepid entomologist Evelyn Cheeseman tramped through New Guinea in search of new insect species in the early 1930s, she showed not the slightest curiosity about the many native “dancing grounds” she passed through. At one village she and her bearers were asked to leave because there was to be a feast and dance that evening, which were tambu, or forbidden, for outsiders to witness. Cheeseman was miffed by this glitch in her plans but comforted herself with the thought that “it is of course well known that it is not particularly desirable to stop in a strange village when the natives are being worked up to their usual frenzy of devil worship.”

Particularly disturbing to white observers was the occasional climax of ecstatic ritual, in which some or all of the participants would, after prolonged dancing and singing or chanting, enter what we might now call an “altered state of consciousness,” or trance. People caught up in trance might speak in a strange voice or language, display a marked indifference to pain, contort their bodies in ways seemingly impossible in normal life, foam at the mouth, see visions, believe themselves to be possessed by a spirit or deity, and ultimately collapse.

A missionary among the Fiji Islanders described such a trance state as “a horrible sight,” but it was sight that was not always possible for the traveler to avoid. In her 1963 survey of the ethnographic literature, the anthropologist Erika Bourguignon found that 92 percent of small-scale societies surveyed encouraged some sort of religious trances, in most cases through ecstatic group ritual. In one of the many accounts of trance behavior among “primitive” peoples, the early-twentieth-century German scholar T. K. Oesterreich offers this, from a white visitor to Polynesia.

As soon as the god was supposed to have entered the priest, the latter became violently agitated, and worked himself up to the highest pitch of apparent frenzy, the muscles of the limbs seemed convulsed, the body swelled, the countenance became terrific, the features distorted, the eyes wild and strained. In this state he often rolled on the earth, foaming at the mouth.

Promiscuous sex was at least comprehensible to the European mind; even human sacrifice and cannibalism have echoes in Christian rite. But as the anthropologist Michael Taussig writes, “It’s the ability to become possessed . . . that signifies to Europeans awesome Otherness if not downright savagery.” Trance was what many of those wild rituals seemed to lead up to, and for Europeans, it represented the very heart of darkness — a place beyond the human self.

Or, what was worse — a place within the human self. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s narrator observes an African ritual and reflects that

it was unearthly, and the men were — No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of their being a meaning in it which you — so remote from the night of first ages — could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything.

To Europeans, there was an obvious explanation for the ecstatic practices of native peoples around the world. Since these strange behaviors could be found in “primitive” cultures almost everywhere, and since they were never indulged in by the “civilized,” it followed that they must result from some fundamental defect of the “savage mind.” It was less stable than the civilized mind, more childlike, “plastic,” and vulnerable to irrational influence or “autosuggestion.” In some instances, the savage mind was described as “out of control” and lacking the discipline and restraint that Europeans of the seventeenth century and beyond came to see as their own defining characteristics. In other accounts, the savage was perhaps too much under control — of his or her “witch doctor,” that is — or as a victim of “mob psychology.” The American political scientist Frederick Morgan Davenport even proposed an anatomical explanation for the bizarre behavior of primitives: They had only a “single spinal ganglion” to process incoming sensory signals and convert them into muscular responses, while the civilized mind had, of course, an entire brain with which to assess the incoming data and weigh the body’s responses. Hence the susceptibility of the savage to the compelling music and visual imagery of his or her culture’s religious rituals — which was regrettable, since “the last thing the superstitious and impulsive negro race needs is a stirring of the emotions.”

But if they thought about it, many Europeans must have realized that the group ecstasy so common among “natives” had certain parallels within Europe itself. For example, Catholic missionaries setting out from France after the 1730s would have heard about the heretical Parisian “convulsionary” cult, whose customary style of worship featured scenes as wild as anything that could be found among the “savages.”

Published by Metropolitan Books; January 2007; $26.00US/$32.00CAN; 978-0-8050-5723-2

About the Author

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. Her latest book, Dancing in the Streets, is available everywhere.

For more information, please visit www.barbaraehrenreich.com.

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